A tale of unrelenting vice gripped Purnea as police arrested Mohammad Imtiaz, a successful yet shady hospital proprietor, for reverting to ATM fraud despite his prosperous new life. The bust at Gulabbagh ATM exposed his audacious card-switching ploy on an unsuspecting withdrawer.
The victim entered a wrong pin, prompting Imtiaz’s intervention. With practiced finesse, he extracted the card, swapped it covertly into a adjacent ATM, and watched the setup fail. A sharp-eyed witness blew the whistle, sparking a mob confrontation that left Imtiaz battered before Dial 112 teams took charge.
Police recovered assorted ATM cards, uncovering a pattern of past convictions and incarcerations. Illiterate but street-smart, Imtiaz parlayed fraud profits into a sprawling, unregistered Line Bazar hospital six years ago. Bolstered by outsourced medics and grassroots promoters, it pulls steady income—but temptation proved too strong.
En route to jail via medical exam, the defiant suspect scolded journalists, ambling handcuff-free far ahead of officers, contrasting with restrained others. Sadar Thana in-charge Ajay Kumar affirmed the fraud FIR and custody order.
Imtiaz’s saga illustrates how criminal impulses endure, thriving beneath respectability. It calls for stricter oversight of financial kiosks, better fraud education, and rehabilitation focus to prevent reformed offenders from relapsing into shadows of their past.